The headline from The Washington Post celebrates yet another milestone: "University of Virginia picks its first female president." But meantime, the data continues to mount that our educational system is massively failing one gender: boys.

"Harder to kill than a vampire." That is what the sociologist Joel Best calls a bad statistic. But, as I have discovered over the years, among false statistics the hardest of all to slay are those promoted by feminist professors.

During her university years, Edith Stein (now St Theresa Benedicta of the Cross) held a strongly pro-feminist view of femininity, and as a professional woman she appreciated the gains made for women who wished to enter fields dominated by men.

The setting of The Handmaid's Tale is "the recent future." The United States has morphed into the Republic of Gilead, dominated by Christian fundamentalists, who have conscripted fertile women into a program of forced breeding.